The Boy In Striped Pyjamas

'The Boy in Striped Pyjamas' is about another lad who doesn't realise that the Holocaust is going on but unlike Giosué this is down purely to his own innocence. Bruno (Asa Butterfield) is a German boy who is forced to move to a new house when his father (David Thewlis) becomes the commandant of a concentration camp. Bruno hates their new home and misses his friends. He spends a lot of time sulking in his bedroom, where, through his window, he spots a fence behind which he sees people wearing 'striped pyjamas'.



Bruno is forbidden to leave the confines of their new house and garden but eventually, out of pure boredom, he goes exploring and finds the camp. There, amongst some implausibly slack camp security he meets a fellow eight-year-old, a Jewish inmate called Shmuel (Jack Scanlon). He soon becomes Bruno's friend and Bruno starts to visit him regularly.

It also had the implausible premise that Shmuel had not been sent straight to the gas chambers and instead, he had been set to work in the camp but still manages to sit at the camp fence undetected long enough to talk to Bruno everyday. No wonder they never seemed to get any further building the hut they were allegedly working on.



Back home, Bruno and his sister are being schooled by a private tutor. He sets about trying to brainwash the children into the Nazi way of thinking.

Bruno's mother (Vera Farmiga) isn't impressed by this and then when she finds out what they're really burning at the camp, she goes mad at the thought of her husband's part in such barbarity. She plans to take the children back to their old house but before he goes, Bruno, probably taken in by the cheery propaganda film of life in the camp that he had seen, he agrees to go under the camp fence to help Shmuel find his missing father. To do this Shmuel supplies Bruno with a set of striped pyjamas.

They are unable to find Shmuel's father but before Bruno can return home, the inmates are all marched into the shower block. Someone probably found out they hadn't really been building that hut. Both Shmuel and Bruno are trapped in there as they pile in the Zyklon B.

Everyone sat quiet right up until the end of the credits but I felt little emotion at the end.

For me, the film really missed the spot. Perhaps it was because we saw the superior 'Life Is Beautiful' on the same bill and that had a more powerful ending. The main problem with the film is that you're supposed to feel sympathy for the Germans and I simply didn't.

The camp commandant deserved to feel some grief and Bruno lost the sympathy vote when he betrayed Shmuel by giving him food when he was summoned to clean glasses in their house and then saying he stole it. This was despite the fact that he must have known the consequences because he'd already seen what had happened to their Jewish servant Pavel when he made the mistake of spilling some wine.

Also the long Hollywood build up to the ending also took the shock away. Then there's the fact that that everyone had a flawless English accent rather than their native German. The film desperately wanted to be 'Schindler's List' but it wasn't. Despite that the acting was good, some of it excellent. David Thewlis was very convincing as the camp commandant. Just as his wife described him, a monster.

La Vita è Bella (Life Is Beautiful) (1997)

Made in 1997 in Italian by Roberto Benigni, who also wrote, directed and starred in it. I believe his real life wife played his screen wife too.

Its 1930s Italy and carefree Guido is careering downhill in a car without brakes, through a village where he is mistaken for the King. This is the first of many comical scenes as he falls for a schoolteacher called Dora, who 'fell out of the sky'. He calls her 'Princess' and despite the fact that she is engaged to another guy, Guido actively pursues her, popping up all over the place where she is. Including one scene where he pretends to be a school inspector and ends up giving an impromptu speech on Arian superiority, a hint to what is to come later in the film. Guido is Jewish.

Swayed by his persistence, his humour and the fact her fiancé is a jerk, she gives in and he gets his girl, whisking her away on a green horse. Green because they painted over the anti-Jewish slogans that were daubed on it. Guido and Dora disappear into what appears to be a greenhouse and when they emerge, five years have passed. They are now married and have a child.



Guido opens the bookstore he's always dreamed of and they live a happy life, until the occupation of Italy by the German army. Then the film gets more serious. Guido is sent to a concentration camp along with his son, Giosue. Dora, who isn't Jewish, drives to the train station and demands to be put on the same train.

Once at the camp, the men and women are separated and a child is usually immediately disposed of but Giosué refuses to take a shower, and unknowingly escapes being gassed. His elderly uncle isn't so lucky. Guido manages to hide Giosué, and to help his son survive the horrors of the camp, he tells him that it's all an elaborate game and that the prize for collecting 1000 points is a tank.

Guido's quick mind saves Giosué from the truth when a German officer requires a translator. Despite not speaking a word of German, Guido volunteers and makes up the words to back up his claim that it's all a game, while cleverly adding that Giosué cannot cry, ask for his mother or say he's hungry.



As the end of the war approaches, time runs out for Guido, he hides
Giosué for the last time, telling him that everyone is looking for him. Guido jeopardises his own survival while he attempts to find Dora and he is taken away and shot.

The next morning, the Americans arrive at the now almost deserted camp. Giosué emerges from hiding just as a tank pulls around the corner. He is thrilled to have won the game. Hitching a ride on the tank, he finds, and is reunited with his mother.

Complete silence after the film and everyone obeys the unwritten art house cinema rule and stay for all the credits. Even I felt a bit choked at the end.

An excellent film, that controversially mixes humour with the Holocaust. It won Academy Awards for Best Actor, Best Foreign Film and Best Dramatic Score. Despite that, it's been criticised for not giving a true depiction of a concentration camp. Which is true, it doesn't dwell on the horrors of the camp and the camp security is at times laughably slack, but nor does it totally ignore these issues.

The film is primarily about a man's relationship with his family and in particular, his son. It shows the great lengths and the sacrifices, in the end the ultimate sacrifice, that a desperate father will go to, to protect his son.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

It's 1939 in London and the Second World War is on the horizon. Guinevere Pettigrew (Frances McDormand) is a middle-aged governess who finds herself forever falling out with her employers, so much so that her agency refuses to help her find work anymore. Destitute, homeless and dressed as Oliver Twist's mother, in the only set of clothes she owns, she steals a client's card from the agency and intercepts an employment assignment at the apartment of a nightclub singer named Delysia Lafosse (Amy Adams).

Delysia needs a social secretary to sort out her chaotic life. What she actually needs is a good slap but that doesn't actually happen. Delysia is determined to become famous on the London stage and by sleeping with Phil, a young West End producer, she hopes to secure a lead role. Problem is she now needs him to leave because the bed he auditioned her in and the flat in which she lives belongs to Nick, a smarmy nightclub owner who she sings for and also dallies with.

Using her initiative, Miss Pettigrew bluffs her way through the situation and gets rid of Phil. The film is a screwball comedy of sorts and at first, she thinks Phil is Delysia's Son. The 'comedy' continues with boyfriends coming and going, underwear hanging from the chandelier, clothes hidden under rugs, characters missing each other in the lift and several double entendres but nothing is particularly funny.



Unfortunately, for Miss Pettigrew, Delysia is an ongoing crisis, a bimbo who needs a lesson in life. Delysia, not her real name, is really just a normal girl who craves to be a social climber but who isn't very good at climbing. Amy Adams plays her perfectly, I suppose, basically reprising her role from Enchanted. She really gets on your nerves but I guess she's supposed to.

Her messy love life is completed by her piano player, Michael. A guy who accepts her for who she really is, and he wants to take her to New York on the Queen Mary but Delysia isn't interested. Her career and desire for the high life cloud her sense of reason.



Miss Pettigrew hangs on to Delysia's coat tails for a day, kind of living the high life. Also being called upon to help a fashion editor called Edythe (Shirley Henderson) try and patch things up with her fiancé, an older lingerie designer (Ciaran Hinds).



It's all very undemanding and in the end, Miss Pettigrew manages to help Delysia see sense and set sail with Michael, and in the process, she herself gets off with Ciaran Hinds. Somehow, Ciaran Hinds always seems to get the girl.

Angel

'Angel' is based on a book by Elizabeth Taylor (no, not that one). The ironically named Angel Deverell (Ramola Garai) lives with her mother above their grocery store. Angel though, doesn't live in reality and isn't remotely angelic. She refuses to accept the world as it is and instead creates her own, through her vivid imagination, where she is a renowned writer who lives in the nearby Paradise House, where she dreamed of living when she was younger.

Nobody thinks she has the ability to be a writer but amazingly, despite little or no life experiences to draw on, a publisher (Sam Neill) takes a wild punt on one of her romantic novels. Even then, he has his reservations and questions among other things, a glaring mistake in her book where she writes that champagne is opened with a corkscrew, but when she throws a tantrum and refuses to change it, he publishes anyway. Fortunately, after this, we are not treated to many more nuggets of her writing.

His wife (Charlotte Rampling) clearly thinks he's mad and can't stand the rude and childish Angel. She suspects it's just because he has the hots for her.

You can't help but agree with his wife about Angel, from the moment the wretched woman appears on screen, she is simply too vile to inspire any sympathy.

Amazingly, the book is a success and one by one all her dreams come true. Angel gets to live like one of the made-up heroines in her books and buys Paradise House but continues to live a life of complete fantasy. She isolates herself from everything else in the world, including the First World War, when it breaks out.



I think the film tries to hammer home the fantasy point because some of the scenes when they are travelling are so badly done, using superimposed backgrounds, that you think you've fallen into a parody of something from the 1950's. Surely, this must have been deliberate.

She meets the Howe-Nevisons. Nora (Lucy Russell), is her obsessive number one fan who begs her to let her be her personal assistant, and her brother Esme (Michael Fassbender), an untalented painter, with whom Angel falls in love with.



At first, he appears to be almost as unlikable as she is and I think they deserve each but then, because Angel is so selfish and so possessive of him, I start to feel sorry for him. She is so annoying that I can't imagine anyone putting up with her.

He goes off to war, the war that Angel pretends doesn't exist, probably just to escape her and comes back wounded. Trapped with Angel and the wheelchair she 'lovingly' provided for him, he hangs himself.

The war is also her undoing, she starts to incorporate her anti-war feelings into her novels and her readership deserts her, at a time when the country are pulling together in the war effort. You almost want to cheer when she herself falls ill and dies.

Oddly having aged badly, the make-up was a bit dodgy (shades of 'Love In The Time Of Cholera'), on her deathbed she seems to rewind back to her late twenties.



I wouldn't say it was a bad film because I found it quite enjoyable. The problem with it was that you never felt anything for the main character and not much for any of the others either. Throughout you just wanted someone to give her a really hard slap.

Orlando (1992)

The film adaptation is by Sally Potter, a brave lass, because I think she's tried to film the unfilmable.

It's all a bit Shakespearean to me with a touch of Ian McEwan. Although as L points out Ian McEwan's usually have a plot. If Virginia Woolf had one when she started out, she soon lost it. From the moment Jimmy Somerville appears as a falsetto angel, you know this is going to be hard work.

Orlando is a young noble man during Queen Elizabeth I's reign. Tilda Swinton plays Orlando, a woman playing a man. Quentin Crisp plays Queen Elizabeth I, hmmm, but he's more convincing as a woman than Tilda Swinton is as a man. This, as I know that during the film Orlando becomes a woman, rather gives the plot away in the first few seconds.



Orlando is offered a house and land by the Queen, if he can stay forever young. The film follows Orlando as he moves through several centuries of British history, experiencing life along the way, and during this time, impossible as it may seem, he doesn't age a day.

He falls in love with a skater during the winter of the Great Frost, the skater is Sasha, a Russian Princess. A young woman who also dresses as a man and as unconvincingly as Orlando does. She toys with his feelings and one night, when they plan to run away together, she fails to turn up. The cow.

Throughout his amble through the centuries, Orlando bumps into people briefly before moving on. Many historical figures appear but aren't properly introduced. So, if you didn't know the story you'd miss them, such as when Nick Greene and other poets, show up. All the monarchs of the passing years are briefly mentioned.

At some point Orland falls into a coma and when he awakes, he's become a woman. Yes really. Orlando doesn't look unduly bothered or even surprised. Suppose we'd all like to try it but I'd like an assurance that there was a way back. There was a previous scene where Orlando also appeared to have a long sleep and I had thought he'd already gender hopped because with Swinton in the lead, it's hard to tell.



This transformation causes him to lose his grand house. Firstly, because he is legally dead but also because he's now female and this amounts to much the same thing. Women were not allowed to own property.

Orlando continues to be unlucky in love and things get no better when he/she falls off his/her horse and is rescued by Billy Zane. They promptly jump into bed but ultimately, he/she is dumped again.



A quick rush through the twentieth century and then we are in the present day, where Orlando is handing his/her memoirs to a publisher. The film closes with Orlando and his/her child back at the house she acquired centuries ago.

They say it's not the getting there but the journey. Hmmm, I'm not convinced. A truly strange film, to say the least. Rambling and largely plotless. It's allegedly a film about self-discovery but Orlando's character seems to learn little throughout the years. You feel he/she's somewhat wasted his/her time. I suppose Orlando learns that each gender has its faults, no matter what century it is, but despite amassing several centuries of experience, he has little to show for it.

In 1941, Woolf committed suicide by filling her pockets with stones and wading into the River Ouse near where she lived. She probably couldn't find her real self either.

Elegy

'Elegy' is based on Philip Roth's short novel 'The Dying Animal'. Which really makes you wonder why they called it 'Elegy'? Because as film titles go, they don't come any better than 'The Dying Animal' where as an 'elegy' is a poem about mourning or something like that.

David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley) is a professor of literary criticism, and is probably around 60 years old (my sort of age). Lecturing to his class, he assesses War and Peace and explains that you bring yourself to any work of art. You see it through your own eyes, through your own situation, with your prejudices etc but whatever your thoughts on it, the work will live on well beyond your thoughts on it. This is an essential theme of the film.

Kepesh may be a respected college professor but he's also a bit of a lecherous old man (well aren't we all) who lusts after his female students (don't we all). Kepesh though appears to be a bit of a success on this front (the swine) but he thoughtfully never attempts to bed any of his students until the final grades are in, when he throws a cocktail party for them and all previous rules are suspended.

Kepesh knows he's an old git with an aging body but he doesn't want to grow up, his mind he reckons still functions as a teenager. Hang on a sec; I can relate to that sentiment but no one would seriously want to be stuck with the mind of a teenager. Heaven forbid. Mid twenties would do me nicely please.

This term's lucky target for seduction is Consuela Castillo (Penelope Cruz). Consuela is a doe-eyed student considerably younger than Cruz herself is but she scrubs up well for it. In fact, she looks great, even with her kit on, and her acting is pretty good too. I have had no time for any of her previous films. Both L and I thought the much touted 'Volver' was rubbish. As for her so called beauty, it's never done anything for me.

The suave Kepesh successfully woos her with flattery, charm, a bit of theatre and some tinkling on the piano. Which is all very annoying because it works; and he promptly falls head over heels in lust with her. So it's another film about old men's fantasies about getting it on with women thirty years their junior. So let's suspend belief, well maybe not. It's no more unbelievable than an OAP like Max Mosley, entertaining five girls in the middle of the afternoon.



They embark on a passionate relationship but Kepesh is realistic and knows it won't last. Therefore, there's little chemistry between them only sex. Thing is Kepesh doesn't usually care if it lasts or not because he shuns commitment anyway, when one of his students inevitably leaves him for a younger model, he just charms another one.

In fact, to fill any gaps Kepesh has a regular-ish shag lined up, three weekly I believe the arrangement was, with Carolyn, a business woman (Patricia Clarkson). They seem well suited but surprisingly, given their arrangement, she gets annoyed when she realises she's not the only dish on his menu.

This time though, his desire for Consuela clearly destabilises him and his cynical façade begins to crack. His friend, award-winning poet, George (Dennis Hopper), we also get an appearance by Deborah Harry as George's wife, comes out with the nugget that 'beautiful women are invisible' because we don't get beyond the 'beauty barrier'. Like admiring a work of art, we see in another person what we want to see. In his case, Kepesh sees the sexual side of the beautiful Consuela and fails to see the person underneath. Bringing his prejudices into it, just like with War and Peace.



He is so blinded by his infatuation that he starts behaving like the teenager, he says is still in his head. To the point of ducking out of attending functions with Consuela and avoiding meeting her parents. I find this a little hard to believe, surely, he's mature enough to not care whether they disapproved and of course, they would. Why should he care if it all ends in tears when he's convinced it will do so anyway? What will be will be. It's an imperfect relationship but aren't they all? The result of not attending her graduation party is that he doesn't see her for two years.

Kepesh also has an estranged 40-something son Kenny (Peter Sarsgaard), a man married with children, who appears on the scene to tell his father that he has been having an affair. Kepesh is too involved in his own predicament to bother dishing out advice or sympathy. Even though he's done plenty of what his son calls 'serial tomcatting' when he was married to Kenny's mother. He left his son and wife many years ago and Kenny has never quite forgiven him.

Cruz is very free with her flesh throughout the film, and when Consuela reappears, her breasts become even more central to the plot. She tells Kepesh that she has breast cancer and expects to lose one of them in the operation. This upsets her because she feels that she will no longer be beautiful. Does she return to tell to Kepesh because she knew his desire was for her body and not for her? Is her beauty all that matters to her? Will he still want to read War And Peace with the best bits ripped out? Or can Kepesh now see beyond the 'beauty barrier'? It's very un-PC these days not to say 'its ok love it doesn't matter what you look like'.

I can see it coming and he asks him to photograph her breasts. What he did with the photos I'm not sure. Were they for her or for him? Are they hanging on his wall above the fireplace?



The ending is inconclusive, we see a couple on the beach. Has Kepesh made a late conversion to true love? I'm not sure.

This film is going to have so many critics because of its subject matter and because of the way it was told, in a slow, pondering character based way. The film takes its time telling its story but I like that approach.

In my opinion, it's a cracking movie that I thoroughly enjoyed. There are sublime performances by Kingsley, Cruz’s nipples, and even a pretty good one from Penelope herself. Never though I'd say that.

Somers Town

The film is sponsored by Eurostar and was originally conceived as a plug to mark the train service's move to the new St Pancras International station but when they asked Shane Meadows to make it, I think he got carried away.

What they got was another typical gritty Meadows' coming-of-age story that looks small budget and is shot almost completely in black and white.

Tomo, played by Thomas Turgoose, the star of Meadow's 'This Is England' has runaway from Nottingham and ends up in London, or more precisely the district of Somers Town, the area between Euston and St Pancras.

Tomo isn't as tough as he seems to think he is and within minutes of cracking open his first illegal lager, he gets mugged by the local lads, as well as getting a good kicking. Typical Meadows stuff.

Tommo refuses a sensible offer of a train ticket and instead meets the shy reserved Marek (Piotr Jagiello), a Polish immigrant, who is his polar opposite. Marek spends his days taking photographs and trying to occupy himself while his father works as a builder on the new station.



Somehow, despite Tomo stealing Marek's photos, they form an unlikely friendship. Most of Marek's photos are of the love of his life, a sexy French waitress called Maria, who he barely knows. Tomo quickly shares his appreciation of her. Although Maria is clearly a lot older and wiser than both of them and well out of their leagues.



Tomo has nowhere to stay and hides out in Marek's bedroom, surviving on scraps from his meals. It is all kept secret from Marek's father, Tomo is even persuaded to do his number two's in a plastic bag so as not to be discovered. That is until the boys get riotously drunk and are found out anyway.



Tomo also has nothing to wear but stealing clothes from the local launderette doesn't help and leaves Tomo dressed as (in his words) a 'female golfer'. Poor old Marek meanwhile is given a knock-off 'Terry Henry' Arsenal shirt by the local wide boy, a chap called Graham, who keeps him money in his thong.

The film meanders to no conclusion in particular and ends with Maria back in Paris and the boys in pursuit, via Eurostar and the film bursts into colour.

As usual with Meadows, a pleasant thought provoking tale. Not one of his best but still very watchable.